Gnome-terminal crashes immediately on start

[puneet336 (Puneet Singh)]

Hi ,
We have following version of gnome-terminal on our centos 7 system -
# GNOME Terminal 3.28.2 using VTE 0.52.4 +GNUTLS

Issue is that there is one user (say UserX) for whom the gnome-terminal application terminates immediately upon launch, ( exit status is 0), but for other linux accounts (say UserA,UserB…) on the same server, the gnome-terminal application works fine.

in the /var/log/message file i don’t see any message related to gnome-terminal application kill/termination.

In hope to see some additional logs , I had compiled same version of the gnome-terminal with debug enabled.

gnome-terminal-3.28.2:

      prefix:                 /home/GNOME_TERMINAL/gnome-terminal-3.28.2/install
      source code location:   .
      compiler:               gcc -std=gnu99
      gterminal:
      DBus interface dir:     /usr/share/dbus-1/interfaces
      DBus service dir:       ${datadir}/dbus-1/services
      Debug:                  yes
      Prefs migration:        yes
      Search provider:        yes
      Nautilus extension:     yes
      Nautilus extension dir: ${libdir}/nautilus/extensions-3.0

but i was not able to see any log file / messages on the terminal from where i issue gnome-terminal command.

i tried attaching the debugger, but it seems that when handle_options function is executed, a terminal is launched as a background thread/process.
for UserX , i was not able to see terminal being launched at this part of the code, and the _ret value from g_dbus_proxy_call_sync function is null

Please do let me know if i can provide any further information here to get some pointers on the issue / logs.

[jakedane]

As only one user is affected it’s likely a mistake in UserX’s shell startup files or UserX’s Gnome Terminal profile settings. Try starting Gnome Terminal with a custom command, like start the shell without using initialization files or start a different shell. Otherwise take help from your distribution’s support channel first.

[puneet336 (Puneet Singh)]

Thank you for the response,
on the different shell suggestion - the userX is able to launch other terminals like Konsole, seems this issue affects only gnome-terminal.

could you please share the command line example of launching gnome-terminal / shell without using initialization files?

meanwhile, I was able to get some more information , hope this can help narrow down issue -

at line terminal-gdbus-generated.c:406

for all the users, the terminal UI gets launched

but for the userX, here is the error message -